Welcome to my apparently bi-annual podcast about boardgames! In this long-overdue episode, I take some time to look back at 2014 and offer my thoughts on the games that stood out most to me from last year. Then I single out one of those games, Five Tribes, to explore further in a more in-depth review.

Reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated. While a million things have kept me away from the mic for far too long, I’ve found my way back and hopefully will be able to carve out a more regular opportunity to continue it into the future.

In this triumphant resurrection episode, I mostly take some time to catch up on a few things that have happened over the last 5 months. Following in the fine tradition of an actually dead podcast, Into the Gamescape, I use a finely-crafted randomization device to help me explore some “waffles” (which basically means that I talk about some random topics that I wanted to share my opinion on). I then round out the show with some investigation of the games I played in 2014, giving some statistics on plays and my general gaming habits over the last 12 months.

]]>http://gamerchris.net/2015/01/exploring-games-episode-26-exploring-waffles/feed/1Picture of the Week – Pandemic: The Curehttp://gamerchris.net/2014/12/picture-of-the-week-pandemic-the-cure/
http://gamerchris.net/2014/12/picture-of-the-week-pandemic-the-cure/#commentsWed, 03 Dec 2014 21:05:18 +0000http://gamerchris.net/?p=1307[…]]]>As huge fan of the original Pandemic, I’ve been looking forward to the new stand-alone dice version of it, Pandemic: The Cure, for quite a while. So when Chip pulled it out last week, I was all over it like white on rice! And thanks to Z-Man, the dice are all cool and translucent-ey!

Christmas is right around the corner, and as I’ve done for the last 6 years, I want to help you all make giving and playing games a bigger part of your holiday celebrations! And as I look around in bookstores, toy stores, and even most of the big box stores these days, it’s easier than ever to find really good games to share with others.

The biggest “problem” is that there are so many games nowadays that finding the best ones can be difficult. But of course, that’s why you have me! So take a look below to see 28 different games that are all pretty widely available that will hopefully be right for almost anyone on your list. And while the formatting of the older lists is all a little screwy, you can also look back at the older lists (2013, 2012, 2011, 2010, 2009, 2008) for over a hundred more suggestions!

This is my hardest category to find new suggestions for. With all the cool new stuff happening throughout the rest of boardgaming, party games haven’t come nearly as far. So instead of more traditional “party games”, most of my suggestions are more “games that you might bring to a party”:

One Night Ultimate Werewolf – If you’ve ever played some version of the Mafia/Werewolf game, this takes that basic idea of trying to figure out who the bad guys are in the group and condenses it down to 10 minutes of crazy negotiation. It’s one of the best short-form social deduction games out there, and if you like that style of game, this is a must-try.

Concept – Concept takes the basic idea of a Password/Charades-style game (trying to get your teammates to guess a word or phrase) and twists it around, because instead of using words or actions to get your point across, you use the images on the board. By putting cubes and tokens onto certain pictures, you can convey some pretty complex ideas, and win or lose, it’s a pretty cool experience.

4-12 players, 40 minutes to play, Cost: $40 – Available in Books-a-Million, some hobby game stores, and online.

Coup – Coup is another social game where bluffing and second-guessing are the core activities. While in the same ballpark as something like One Night Ultimate Werewolf, it also has a lot of differences, because instead of being on teams, everyone is for themselves. You try to keep your opponents guessing as you switch between bluffing and telling the truth to take different actions, eventually trying to eliminate all the other players and claim the crown. It’s quick, brutal, and kinda mean in a really fun and light-hearted way.

Bang! The Dice Game – So you have a Sheriff, his deputies, some outlaws, and a Renegade all fighting over a town. All the lawmen want to take out the unsavory types, the Outlaws want to kill off the Sheriff, and the Renegade wants to face off against the Sheriff alone to take his job. But the problem is that no one except for the Sheriff reveals their true intentions, so you have to figure it all out based on how they roll and use their dice each turn to attack other players. It’s another social deduction kind of game, but this one is a little more on the wild and crazy side due to the dice rolling and special powers that everyone has.

3-8 players, 15 minutes to play, Cost: $18 – Available in

Cardline – Much like Timeline that I’ve mentioned in the past, Cardline is a very simple game about putting things in order. Whether it’s the geographic location of cities, the size of animals, or who knows what else they’ll come up with, you can find one of these games to tickle your interest.

Children’s games are ones that are simple enough for very young kids to play with adult help, or for older children to play by themselves. Especially with my girls getting a little older now, it’s become very important for me to find some really solid children’s games to play with them. Here in the U.S., it can still be pretty difficult to find anything more than the same old re-published mess with a new media tie-in that has always been around, but here are a few ideas that might be a little better to try:

Bugs in the Kitchen – This is a wild and crazy game where all the players are trying to catch a bug that’s running around in the kitchen. What makes it amazing is that the bug is sort of actually alive and moves around the board! (Don’t worry, it’s just one of those mechanized HEXBUGs, not a real, live bug). You get the bug to move towards your trap by twisting these little gates (made from forks, knives, and spoons) on the board to make a pathway that will hopefully lead into it and away from the other players, and the first player to catch 5 bugs is the winner!

2-4 players, Ages 5+, 15 minutes to play, Cost: $30– Available in some hobby game stores and online.

Rhino Hero – The point of this game is to get rid of your cards. But what makes it cool is that you only get rid of them by building up this house of cards in the middle of the table and then moving the little, wooden Super Rhino figure up higher and higher as more floors are built. If you make the house fall, you lose and the person with the least cards left wins! But if you can make it to the top and empty your hand, you win!

2-5 players, Ages 6+, 10 minutes to play, Cost: $13 – Available some places online and especially from the publisher at HabaUSA

Enchanted Forest – Enchanted Forest is a classic children’s game where you move around looking for different storybook characters and items hidden under cute little plastic trees. But since the trees are put back after you look at them, there’s also a big memory element of remembering where things when you need to find them later in the game. So for a memory game that has a lot more game involved than most, it’s a great choice with a wonderful theme.

Zingo – This is a simple Bingo variant that uses pictures instead of letters and numbers. And to avoid the need for a caller, it has a neat little tile shooter device that spits out picture tiles. If you need that tile for your board, you have to shout out its name before anyone else. It’s very simple, and even comes in versions that use different media characters.

Doodle Quest – This is a very unique game where players move through a series of quests to score points. Each quest requires you to draw something to meet a challenge, but what’s interesting is that you actually do your drawing on a separate piece of clear plastic that you then lay over top of the challenge board to see how well you did. For example, if it’s a maze on the quest board, you would need to draw the path you would take on your plastic sheet, and then lay it on top of the quest board to see if you made it through. This is a game that I’m pretty excited about, and hope to possibly get for my girls this Christmas!

Family games tend to be a little more complicated or involved than children’s games, so they are most appropriate for slightly older kids (starting at age 6 or more) and work really well for adults to play with children:

Rise of Augustus – Even though this game has a Roman theme and a few other bells and whistles, at its core it’s basically a bingo-style game. One player pulls tokens from a bag that tells you which kind of symbol you can cover on your cards. The real decisions in the game, however, come in the fact that you have at least 3 cards that you’re working on, and that completed cards both give you points and give you abilities that may make it easier to complete the other cards you have left. It’s a really fantastic game that plays quickly and continues to impress me.

2-6 players, Ages 8+, 20-30 minutes to play, Cost: $40 – Available in some hobby game stores and online

Camel Up – This adorable camel racing game just won the prestigious Spiel des Jahres (Game of the Year) award in Germany. The actual race is pretty random and chaotic, but what makes it fun is that the player choices comes in making bets on how the race will go. And when camels land on other camels along the track, they actually stack up and then can move together in the future. So if you’re looking for an attractive, light racing game, this might be right up your alley.

2-8 players, Ages 8+, 30 minutes to play, Cost: $45 – Available in Books-a-Million, some hobby game stores, and online

Gravwell: Escape from the 9th Dimension – Gravwell is another race game, except this time players are trying to escape in their spaceships from a black hole in the center of the board. You start each round by taking turns drafting cards that will help you move, but which also have letters on them. So then on each turn, everyone chooses one card at the same time and flips them over, and they take effect in alphabetical order based on that letter. What makes it even cooler is that cards don’t just move you along the track, they usually either pull you towards or push you away from the nearest other ship, so trying to guess the order that they will play out in is really important (because you can easily end up moving backwards if another player’s ship moves before your card takes place). It’s got a little higher-level thought and guessing in it, but is still pretty light and plays quickly.

Ticket to Ride: Europe – The original Ticket to Ride is probably the best family game out there, and this European version is now more widely available as well. In both, players try to collect and use colored train cards to claim routes on the board to connect cities. Points are scored both for claiming the routes and by completing Route cards that give you a goal of linking together two cities that might be very far apart. The advantage of the European version is that it also includes an extra rule that keeps players from being blocked out of routes, which makes it a slightly “nicer” game. The only disadvantage is that most Americans probably don’t know the geography as well (which could, of course, be a nice opportunity as well!).

Shadows Over Camelot – This is a relatively light cooperative game (meaning that players work together to fight against the game instead of each other) about the legend of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. Players use their actions and special powers to collect cards, complete quests, and fight against the forces of darkness to win the game. And to really raise the stakes, there’s even an option to include the possibility that one player might be a traitor to Camelot, who is secretly working against the rest of the group. It’s a really fun game that can be played on many levels and which has a lot of excitement that your family and friends can face together.

Dungeons & Dragons Starter Set – This item is a little different in that it’s not a boardgame. A brand new version of the classic roleplaying game Dungeons & Dragons just came out this year, and they have released this extremely affordable starter box that has everything you would need to introduce it to your family or friends. As someone who was dramatically influenced by a similar starter set many years ago, I’m excited to see something like this available again. And just in case you have heard crazy or scary things about D&D in the past, let me assure you that it’s just a fun tool for being creative and making stories about heroes, monsters, and cool fantastic places. If you and your children like to read or watch fantasy stories, it’s something I really think you need to try out.

2-6(ish) players, Ages 9-12+, 2-4 hours to play a session, Cost: $20 – Available in most book stores, hobby game stores, and online

These are generally small form games that are easy to set up, quick to play, and don’t take up too much room on the shelf (or in the sock!):

Sushi Go – This adorable little game is all about collecting sushi to score points. Each type of sushi scores in a different way, so you have to make some decisions about which ones you want to get to make them work together well. The way you get these cards is through a “draft”, where you start with a hand of cards and choose just one of them. Then you pass the rest of the cards to the next player while the player on your other side passes you the rest of their hand. This is done over and over until all the cards are taken, and then you score. It’s really fast, fun, and just too cute for words!

Pandemic: Contagion – It’s definitely a stretch to include this as a Stocking Stuffer (because the box would definitely stretch out any but the largest stockings it’s put in), but I wanted to find a place for it because I’m really enjoying it a lot right now. Players actually take on the roles of virulent diseases that are threatening humanity, and spend actions each turn to draw cards, increase their abilities, and infect cities. While being pretty quick and approachable, there’s still a lot of decisions to made, and I think it’s got a lot of meat for how long it takes to play.

2-5 players, Ages 13+, 30 minutes to play, Cost: $30 – Available in Books-a-Million, some hobby game stores, and online

Diamonds – Diamonds is a brand-new trick-taking game that has its roots in things like Hearts or Spades, but also has some really cool twists that really change up how you approach the game. It still feels like a traditional trick-taking game if you enjoy that sort of thing, but it also feels new and different.

2-6 players, Ages 8+, 30 minutes to play, Cost: $25 – Available in some hobby game stores and online

Pairs – Pairs is more than just one new game, it’s actually a whole new style deck of cards that already has dozens of different games that you can play with it. Most of the games center around the idea that getting a pair is a bad thing, but I’ve already tried out 5 or 6 of them, and there’s also a lot of variety in what different designers have done with it. Plus, there are several different art styles for the deck ranging from fruit to pirates to goblins. It’s impressed me enough that I hope to see a deck in my stocking on Christmas!

2-8 players, Ages 10+, 5-30 minutes to play, Cost: $10 – Available in some hobby game stores and online (especially at Paizo.com)

The Builders: Middle Ages – The Builders is a simple card game where you collect Worker cards that will give you the resources and abilities you need to construct various Building cards. You have a limited number of actions, have to manage your money, and be as efficient as you can to score enough points to win before you opponents do.

2-4 players, Ages 10+, 30 minutes to play, Cost: $18– Available in some hobby game stores and online

Sail to India – This incredibly small game is made up of just a deck of cards and a few wooden cubes, but it has the weight and depth of a full-sized euro-style board game. Players use their actions to sail their ships, discover new cities, claim good, build buildings, and develop technologies, choosing the path that they believe will let them gain the most prestige and win the game.

3-4 players, Ages 12+, 60 minutes to play, Cost: $20 – Available in some hobby game stores and online

“Advanced” can certainly be relative, but the hallmark of these games is that they tend to be a little too complex for children, require real thought and decision-making to play, and take a little longer to play.

Suburbia – This is a city-building game where players buy buildings to add to their suburb to increase their income, grow their reputation, and hopefully attract more residents. The really cool thing is that these buildings usually interact with the buildings around them (and sometimes even further away) to do cool things. This game, more than any other, gives me some of the feel that I used to get playing SimCity and other things like that.

1-4 players, 90 minutes to play, Cost: $60 – Available in Barnes & Noble, some game stores, and online

Eldritch Horror – This is a heavy-duty cooperative game set in the HP- Lovecraft-inspired Cthulhu mythos of the 1920’s. Players take the role of investigators racing across the globe trying to learn more about and eventually thwart the plans of evil people, fight horrible monsters, and keep arcane horrors from beyond time at bay. If you like the stories and theme of the Cthulhu mythos, I think this is far and away the best game to immerse you in that world.

1-8 players (but don’t play it with more than 5), 180 minutes to play, Cost: $60 – Available in Barnes & Noble, some hobby game stores, and online

Imperial Assault – This is a Star Wars game where one player controls the forces of the Empire while everyone else plays Rebels trying to infiltrate their base. It’s got lots of cool, plastic miniatures, has a number of scenarios to play through, and can even be played as a light miniatures skirmish game. Yes, it’s expensive, but for the gamer in your life that loves Star Wars (and really, who of us isn’t), it’s a really cool gift.

2-5 players, 90+ minutes to play, Cost: $100 – Available in some hobby game stores and online

Freedom: The Underground Railroad – On a completely different note, Freedom is a historically-themed cooperative game about helping to free slaves by moving them up the underground railroad and into Canada. This game handles a very sensitive topic beautifully, and manages to be both a truly excellent game and to be an emotional window into the life of those brave slaves and conductors. It’s a little heavy, but well worth the financial and emotional investment.

1-4 players, 90 minutes to play, Cost: $70 – Available in some hobby game stores and online

The Pathfinder Adventure Card Game – This game is a bit strange. It’s a card game where players have a unique deck and special powers much like you would in a fantasy roleplaying game. But what makes it really cool and different is that it’s played over a series of up to 33 different adventures, during which your characters abilities and the cards in their deck get better and better over time. For a group, family, or individual looking for a long-term game that they can come back to over and over again, this is a really cool cooperative experience. And you can now either get the original version or the new pirate-themed Skulls & Shackles version.

Five Tribes – Days of Wonder typically has more family-weight games, but Five Tribes is a little bit more complex. It’s a really cool game where you move workers around an array of tiles to trigger different actions that let you do all sorts of things to score points. It’s pretty easy to pick up and play, but there can definitely be some deep thought in figuring out what is the best move. Plus, I always like it when a game has different strategies to try out, and Five Tribes is wide open when it comes to that kind of choice.

2-4 players, 60 minutes to play, Cost: $60 – Available in some hobby game stores and online

Game Surplus – excellent service, sometimes have rare imports (I’ve had good experiences with them before as well)

Miniature Market – I hear good things, especially about prices, but I’ve never used them myuself

]]>http://gamerchris.net/2014/11/gamerchris-holiday-gift-guide-2014/feed/3Picture of the Week – Five Tribeshttp://gamerchris.net/2014/11/picture-of-the-week-five-tribes/
Tue, 18 Nov 2014 19:59:11 +0000http://gamerchris.net/?p=1248[…]]]>I’ve really been enjoying Five Tribes lately, and I also think that it’s absolutely beautiful on the table. In fact, while I like this image, I feel like it doesn’t really do the game justice…
]]>Contagious Star Tribes Run in Pairs with a Fireflyhttp://gamerchris.net/2014/11/contagious-star-tribes-run-in-pairs-with-a-firefly/
http://gamerchris.net/2014/11/contagious-star-tribes-run-in-pairs-with-a-firefly/#commentsFri, 14 Nov 2014 20:49:55 +0000http://gamerchris.net/?p=1223[…]]]>It’s been a busy, game-playing couple of weeks! In addition to my regular game nights, I also headed off to Charlotte for my 13th visit to MACE this past weekend. But I’ll get around to talking about that a little bit later, so for now, let me get into what I’ve been playing right around here with the Hypermind Boardgamers…

Android: Netrunner

After the week before, I was a little worried that Kenny might be losing interest in Netrunner, but then he came back this time with his core-only decks in hand asking to play. I was more than happy to oblige him, of course, so we got in a couple of games. We started with me playing my HB corp deck while he pulled out his Noise (Anarch) runner deck. Things were going really well for me and I had gotten up to a 5-0 lead as we neared the end of the game. But then, he pulled out an amazing glory run on my R&D using Maker’s Eye and a 2-token Medium, letting him see 5 cards from my deck. The first couple were misses, but then he hit a Priority Requisition and some other 2-point agenda, tying me at 5 points with one more card left to access. Thankfully, it wasn’t the agenda he needed, so I was able to score my last two points on my next turn to take the 7-5 win.

We then switched sides and I took on his NBN corp deck with my Kate (Shaper) runner deck. Unfortunately for him, his deck is all about tagging the runner, mostly using traces in one way or another, and on turn one I played out two Rabbit Holes, giving me 3 total Link, which gave me a huge advantage in all traces for the whole game. I was also pretty careful, played out my whole rig pretty quickly, and was eventually (once the Magnum Opus hit the table) able to get into any server at will that I wanted to check.

It’s no surprise, but I love Netrunner. And there’s a lot of talk going around right now about the new rotation policy that’s just been announced, the cost of new players buying into the game, and it’s long-term health. But playing more and more of this Core-set-only limited environment has me totally convinced that it’s a really great way for new people to get into Netrunner. So much of what makes Netrunner cool is about the choices of both players during the game; how they use their clicks and put pressure on their opponent through play. Yes, of course, more advanced deck construction is important and fun and gives an almost infinite space for creativity and variety. But there’s also a lot of player skill and nuance to the game that can be discovered, developed, and mastered just at the Core Set level, certainly enough to let new players know if it’s the kind of game that they might want to really “buy in” to and get competitive with. And still, when you compare it to how expensive it is to buy into something like Standard Magic (which rotates half its cards every year), there’s no comparison in how much money you’re talking about.

Five Tribes

But anyway, then Kenny went off to play Ogre with Keith, so I joined Stacy and James to play one of my favorite new games lately, Five Tribes. Right from the start, I decided to rush the game as quickly as I could by dropping my camels to claim tiles every chance I got. I aggressively used the assassins power to pick off single meeples elsewhere as well, sometimes even picking up two tiles on a single turn. But on the other hand, I wasn’t necessarily getting the most valuable tiles each time, and I bidding pretty liberally to get the actions I wanted. Still, though, I thought I was in pretty good shape until we started counting up points. In addition to having a few points here and there in each category, Stacy had over 40 more points than I did left in coins (mostly from being very conservative in his bidding), and he managed to edge me out by just 2 measly points!

Yep, just 38 minutes. Take that, all you people who complain about the Analysis Paralysis rampant in Five Tribes!

I just love how wide open this game is, where you can choose from so many options where you want to get your points. It’s very tactical for the most part, but there are also some definite strategic paths you can take (particularly when you pick up a Djinn or two that point you in a particular direction). But it’s also not so limiting that you get locked into one particular path and lose the ability to be opportunistic and jump on a cool move that you see, even if it has nothing to do with the rest of your plan.

But with all this, it’s still a pretty light game overall. I understand how some people can get locked up looking at all the options, but it’s really not that complicated. You decide what sort of actions you need on your turn, find the 2 or 3 spots on the board that will do that for you, and then run a quick calculation or two to see which is best. If you’re paying attention, you might also see some other option that another player left you that’s just too good to ignore, but that’s just one or two more options to consider. It’s just not that hard of a thing to do.

Pairs

Then, Chris pulled out another of his Pairs decks (the Goblin deck this time) and taught a few new variants. We started with the “standard” way to play (called the Continuous game). But then, we went into the “Port” variant that turned it around and had players trying to get points in a blackjack sort of way. And finally, we tried out one of the gambling variants (Goblin Poker, since that’s the deck we were using). It went on a little too long, but at the same time, I could see that the options for choice, bluffing, and pushing your luck were similar in most ways to the level of play that you get in “real” poker version (even Texas Hold’em).

Pairs is definitely on my wishlist, and will show up on my Gift Guide this year as well. All the versions I’ve seen are attractive, and I really like how many solid little games have been developed around the “pairs” theme to make use of this new “deck of cards”.

Star Realms

To finish up last week, I taught Darren Star Realms and played my first-ever “real” game using physical cards. But I probably don’t need to talk much about it, since many of you have (like me) probably already played somewhere around 954 games of it on your phone or tablet. It’s fun and quick, but also very random. It’s very similar to Ascension, but seems to me to be a little slicker/smoother but also a little more luck-dependent. And I’m not really convinced that the factions are really all that balanced either.

Over the weekend at MACE, I picked up a few small games here and there. On the way down, actually, I stopped by the Books-a-Million at Concord Mills and found that they had a suprisingly amazing game section. Among the many cool titles, I found (and bought) Pandemic: Contagion, which I’ve been looking forward to trying ever since I heard about it. Now, Contagion has very little to do with the original Pandemic other than its theme, which in this case has been turned around so that the players are the diseases trying to compete to kill the most people and destroy the most cities.

The way it plays is that there are a number of cities in the middle of the table, and on each of the 12 turns in the game, players will use their 2 actions to either draw cards, use those cards to infect cities, or use them to increase their abilities to draw more cards or infect more effectively. Each city has a capacity for a certain number of disease cubes, and when it’s met or exceeded, it pops and scores points based on majorities for the players present on it. What’s cool is that the person who put the last cube(s) on the card to put it over the edge also gets a small ability (like drawing a card or two, or putting a disease cube into another city), so sometimes you might help someone else finish off a city that they are winning just to get the extra ability.

In our game, we spread out way too much. Instead of jumping into each others’ cities to share points and snipe special abilities, we each kept to ourselves, and as we entered the last couple of turns, only 2 or 3 cities had popped so far. I was out of cubes to place at one time, but by being opportunistic with the interim scoring that can happen, I had a pretty decent lead. Chip made a good surge late by using a completion power a time or two, but both he and James came up a little short in trying to overtake me.

I’ve really been enjoying Pandemic: Contagion so far. It’s extremely quick and easy to teach, but I feel like it still has a decent level of decision-making and a reasonable depth of play. You’ve essentially got 24 actions each game to use, and have to spread those out over increasing your abilities, drawing cards, and actually infecting cities. There may be some basic strategies that are almost always a good idea (like increasing your drawing power at least once at the beginning of the game), but beyond that, there also seems to be a good variety of approaches that you can make strategically. But then the event revealed each turn also does a good job of throwing you curveballs (sometimes for the good, sometimes for the bad) that you have to adjust for as you take your actions as well. And of course, you may also want to keep an eye open for opportunities to glom onto another player’s city to pick up a few points and essentially add to that 24-action economy that you have.

Like I said, it’s pretty light and really fast, so while it’s not the deepest or most revolutionary game in the world, the bang I get for my buck (time-investment-wise, anyway) has been really great so far.

At MACE, I signed up for a game of Firefly that turned out to just be the game organizer and myself. But I still had a really great time with it and was left wanting more. So I made a point of pushing it a little bit at game night and got Chip and Keith to bite, even though Keith hadn’t ever played before. But both are fans of the show, so I figured it would go well.

If you looked at how my game actually played out, though, I don’t know if “well” is how you would describe it. Without exaggeration, I believe that I was stopped by the Alliance cruiser every single time I tried to cross Alliance space. And the sad thing is that the only illegal thing on my ship pretty much every time was my pilot (Jesse), who just happened to have an unjust warrant for her arrest. They never found her hidden away in my extra-secret cargo area, but it was very annoying to get stopped at least once each time I tried to cross the center of the board. Sure, she was driving the ship, but maybe I should have just spaced her at some point to avoid the entanglements, but I also figured that my luck would turn around at some point. It didn’t.

With Keith being new, my bad luck with the Alliance, and then just having not played the game much lately, we were pretty darn slow going. We were doing the “Niska’s Holiday” story card, which basically meant that we all had to be really good at fighting, do illegal and immoral things for Adelai Niska, and get together a big wad of cash by the end of the game. As 11pm neared (the closing time of our FLGS), we didn’t think we’d be able to finish. But then, at the very last minute, Chip managed to complete his fourth job for Niska, get to Aesir and undermine Niska’s nephew, and have the 12,000 credits he needed to win!

There are definitely better games than Firefly. As a space-based mercantile/pick-up-and-deliver game, I’d say that Merchant of Venus is definitely superior. But the thing is, amazing gameplay is not the reason to play Firefly. What it’s going to give you is a truly immersive, thematic Firefly experience, and it does it better than almost any other media-tie-in game has ever done before. Every little thing in the game is there because it serves the theme, and even when the whims of chance work against you in the game, you can still feel fulfilled because your misfortune is completely in line with all the bad crap that happened to the Serenity and others around the ‘Verse.

But I also don’t want to give the impression that the gameplay is actually badin any way. Quite on the contrary, I find it to be very intuitive and fun to play even on a mechanical level. However, every mechanical thing in the game is there to support the theme and the thematic experience it brings, so to me anyway, I can’t imagine that it would be nearly as good an experience for someone not at least somewhat involved in the background material. When Reavers showed up that one time and ate all the colonists I had ferried all the way across the galaxy to their new home that I was now orbiting, I wasn’t upset because freaking Reavers showed up and ate all my colonists! Woo hoo! How awesome! Yes, I lost that game, but I got a cool moment and a great story to tell out of the deal, which was good enough for me at the moment.

So while it’s not something that I’ll pull out all that frequently (for time reasons if nothing else), Firefly is definitely a game that I’m always going to be looking forward to the next time I get to play it.

]]>http://gamerchris.net/2014/11/contagious-star-tribes-run-in-pairs-with-a-firefly/feed/1Fun With Nicolas Cage’s Facehttp://gamerchris.net/2014/11/fun-with-nicolas-cages-face/
Wed, 12 Nov 2014 17:07:57 +0000http://gamerchris.net/?p=1226[…]]]>From time to time on BGG, a geeklist gets started where people put famous people’s faces into game box covers. It was Nicolas Cage’s turn this week, and here were my contributions…

]]>Pairs of Tiny Android Winter Werewolveshttp://gamerchris.net/2014/11/pairs-of-tiny-android-winter-werewolves/
Thu, 06 Nov 2014 17:17:03 +0000http://gamerchris.net/?p=1204[…]]]>Usually, I like to play some number of “horror” games as Halloween approaches. Well, it’s actually been a few years since I’ve done that successfully, but I still cling to the idea that it’s something I enjoy doing. So then, with October 31 breathing down my throat, it was nice to actually get a few of these games played last week at game night. In my bag, I brought along things such as Fury of Dracula, Letters from Whitechapel, One Night Ultimate Werewolf, the Walking Dead card game, and the game we got to the table first this week…

It was still early, so just Chris and James joined me in a “medium” length scenario (Home Sweet Home) that had us needing to build lots of barricades around the colony and in the outside locations. We didn’t jump on this really early, though, since we were also worried about searching around in the outside locations for stuff we’d need for crisis cards, as well as trying to empty out the colony a little so we wouldn’t be too overwhelmed by new zombies there. One of James’ characters was Thomas Heart the Soldier, who was able to kill 2 zombies at a time, so he hung back to protect the house while some of our better gatherers went out.

My secret objective was the “Leader”, which meant that in order to win, the colony had to succeed and I had to control the most followers. And on the first turn or so, I thought I had gotten lucky when the Crossroads card had Mike Cho the Ninja show up to save my other character (Jenny Clark the Waitress) from a zombie horde in the hospital. But then, when I sent him back to the colony to help fight zombies there, he took a frostbite as his second wound, and despite Jenny making a terrible racket tearing apart the hospital, I couldn’t find the medicine I needed to save him before the start of my next turn, so he died. Easy come, easy go, I guess.

Thankfully, my other starting character was Gabriel Diaz the hunky Fireman, who could dig deeply into location decks looking for survivors. So after the debacle with Mike Cho, I sent him out to start looking. But on his first trip out the door, I rolled a bite on the exposure die and he died. Thankfully, we realized that James hadn’t drawn a Crossroads card for my turn, and when we looked at it, it actually triggered when I moved a character from the colony. Rolling back time a little, I instead decided to use the Crossroads effect and drive a noise tanker truck back to the colony, giving me a handful of fuel but bringing 6 zombies back with me instead. From how we read the order of operations, I think that’s right, anyway, that you don’t roll the exposure die until you arrive at the new location, meaning that I never had to roll it since I basically stayed at the colony based on the card effect.

By then, it was getting into the 4th (of 6) turns and I think we had a crisis card that required tools or we’d lose 2 morale. James went first and fought some zombies, but I don’t think that he contributed anything to the crisis. He did manage to find Bev Russell the Mother at the school with two kids, though, which made me even more worried about me actually getting enough followers to complete my secret objective. So my main focus for the turn was to send Gabriel out somewhere looking for more people. I contributed a card or two to the crisis, but Chris said that he had it under control.

Now, for most of the game, Chris’ two characters (Alexis Grey the Librarian and Kodiak Colby the Woodsman) had been out in the surrounding locations searching for stuff. Alexis mostly hung around the Library (since she’s knows it so well and can search there very effectively, while Colby hit a number of places. But he had contributed a number of cards to earlier crises. But then, on this turn, he used the “Attract Zombies” action with Alexis, which overran the Library and had her get eaten, dropping our morale to just 2. It was very fishy, but there were a lot of zombies at the Colony right then, so maybe it could have been helpful. He also dropped several cards into the crisis stack, so perhaps he was going to have us over-fulfill the crisis to get that morale hit back.

That was, of course, until we flipped the stack over and saw the 3 or 4 non-tool cards that he had thrown into it, losing us the crisis and dropping morale down to 0. He of course then flipped over his evil, nasty Betrayer card and celebrated his solo victory over James and me.

Losing this game made me like it even more than I did the first time. There’s just so much cool stuff going on here, and while some of the core mechanics aren’t all that new or unique (hidden roles, contributing cards secretly to a common crisis, going to locations to dig through decks of cards there…), they are handled so freaking wellin Dead of Winter.

Yes, you have “loyal” and “traitor” roles. But even as a loyal player, I was continually distracted by the need to fulfill my personal objective, which ultimately led me to ignore some of the fishy things that Chris was doing. And then, even thou Chris and Kodiak Colby were clearly evil to the core, he also had to stay his hand until he had everything in place to achieve his victory condition as well. It just adds in a fantastic layer of complexity to take something that has become so ubiquitous in this type of game to a whole other level of fun with even more interesting decisions.

More than that, the most unique mechanic in the game (the Crossroads cards) work out really well for what they’re intended to do. In a lot of other games, something like this might just be a random event deck that screws over or otherwise toys with the players and their plans. But Crossroads cards almost always introduce an interesting choice that makes you reconsider your plan in cool and thematic ways, rather than making you scrap your plan because of something that you couldn’t prepare for.

I’m not quite ready to just wholeheartedly sing its praises, but so far at least, I feel like Dead of Winter is definitely living up to it hype for me.

Speaking of hype, Chris just received his copy of Tiny Epic Kingdom, so we pulled it out with a petty big group of us. I grabbed the Centaurs, who like to be in the plains regions, so I sort of fell into a strategy of getting lots of food (which is produced by the plains) and rushing out all my population (which you need food to make).

It worked pretty well, and I was able to get all 7 dudes on the map by endgame. Unfortunately, the rush part of my strategy didn’t work out, because someone else was able to trigger the end that same turn by completing their “technology” track.

There wasn’t much fighting all game long… at least until the last turn, anyway. But then, it was a huge free-for-all as we turned on each other like monkeys on a cupcake. The biggest mistake I made in the game was spending most of my magic resource on that last turn to upgrade to the final level of my tech (which only scored me a couple of points at the most) instead of holding it back to use in defending myself (because you have to have magic and/or ore to increase your power). Instead, I lost 3 territories on that turn and ended up with a very mediocre score.

Meanwhile, James used his Orcs’ powers to win some easy battles, pick up extra territories, and win pretty comfortably.

There’s nothing particularly wrong with Tiny Epic Kingdoms. But there’s also not really much that really excites me about it either. And for the most part, the feeling I had is that the simplicity of the rules and balanced action selection mechanic is going to pretty much keep people on par with each other until the last turn, where chaos will ensue until the most opportunistic person pulls out the win. Like so many microgames before it, I don’t see it having much staying power for me at all. But I’m also not offended by it or anything, and I’d welcome the chance for it to prove me wrong.

I had heard a crazy amount of praise for this game since its release, so I finally picked it up recently when I saw it at Barnes & Noble. Then, while we were all sitting the after TEC, I cajoled everyone around into playing one big session of ONUW.

As it turned out, we actually ended up playing twice. I had the app for my iPad, so Eric Summerer’s silky voice guided us through both sessions. We started off with just the more core roles (werewolves, seer, troublemaker, robber, villagers… and the masons since we had so many people) in the first game, but then added in a few others for the second.

in that first session, Keith claimed pretty quickly to be the Seer, and said that he looked at two cards in the middle of the table. We asked him what he saw, but he hesitated and was only able to tell us one of them. I, of course, assumed that this was just a failed ruse on the part of a werewolf, and was ready to lynch him right then. As it turned out, he was telling the truth and just couldn’t remember, so I sort of screwed that game up for the humans. Keith then got his revenge, however, as he took the win as the solo werewolf in the next game.

Despite all its flaws, I still enjoy playing the “real” version of Werewolf from time to time. I’ve also tried out a number of these “Werewolf-lite” games as well and enjoyed most of them, too. And after these first couple of plays, I’d say that One Night Ultimate Werewolf probably does the best job of boiling the whole Werewolf experience to its most elemental parts.

I don’t know that I like it more than games such as The Resistance and Coup, but while those games do similar things, they also feel pretty different. But you definitely feel like you’re still playing Werewolf (for good or bad, I suppose) while playing ONUW… except that it only takes about 10 minutes, which is pretty incredible.

Now, we haven’t actually played this as a real game yet, but I’ve used it as sort of a group activity between games a few times lately, so I thought I’d go ahead and talk a little about it. I picked it up on a total lark because it has this awesome, giant black mustache on the front of the box. I had no idea what it was like, but giggled with glee at the thought of inflicting it upon my unsuspecting gaming buddies.

As it turns out, it’s actually pretty cool. The basic idea is that you take one of the cards picturing the iconic moustache from some famous person or character and hold it up to your face under your nose. People try to guess whose it is, and there are a list of increasingly helpful clues on the back to help them out. Whoever gets it first gets the points associated with the clue you last gave, so getting it earlier is obviously better.

And like I said, for the 3 or 4 minutes at a time we’ve been playing around with it, it’s been fun. Especially if you’re participating in No Shave November/Movember this month, it’s a no-brainer to include as a thematic tie-in.

Chris was on a Kickstarter roll last week, so he pulled out this recently fulfilled game as well. Pairs is just a deck of cards with, but it aspires to be much like regular cards in that there are a multitude of different games and variants already developed for it. The main thread running through all of them, however, is the fact that you have face up cards in front of you, and you have to make a push-your-luck decision each turn whether to take another card or not, because if the new card ever pairs with a card you have, bad things happen to you. And since the deck is triangular (numbers valued 1 through 10, with as many cards in the deck as the value… 5 fives, 7 sevens, etc.), there’s a lot you can consider to make your decision. But there’s also a lot of luck in whatever flops off the top of the deck, so it’s definitely a lighter/filler sort of thing.

So anyway, we played the most basic version and then the “continuous” version of the base game. It sort of has a winner (the person with the least points, I suppose), but mostly, it just has one big loser (the person who “busted” with taking too many points).

I was really impressed with how this game actually played. Like I said, it’s very light and pretty darn random, but it also plays ridiculously fast, so it feels like a good balance between decisions and time investment. Chris got 4 or 5 different versions of the deck (different artwork on each), and has a big book of variants that we can explore, so I’m definitely looking forward to trying out more of them in the coming months. I’ll probably also pick this up for me and maybe others (for Christmas maybe) when it’s available in retail.

Lastly, I finished up the night with a couple of games of Android: Netrunner. It feels like it’s been forever since I last played, and for Kenny it had been even longer. He didn’t have his cards with him, so I lent him a deck and we tried to play. But since he hadn’t seen some of the cards and it’s always hard to play a deck you don’t know a lot about, he ended up conceding the first game when I was clearly on my way to victory.

I then pulled out my “core-only” decks, and he took the Haas Bioroid deck against my Kate deck. It was a close game where both of us were doing pretty well and building up well through the mid-game… but then we ran out of time and had to stop early.

]]>Picture of the Week – Dead of Winterhttp://gamerchris.net/2014/11/picture-of-the-week-dead-of-winter/
http://gamerchris.net/2014/11/picture-of-the-week-dead-of-winter/#commentsMon, 03 Nov 2014 20:38:53 +0000http://gamerchris.net/?p=1206[…]]]>So far, I’m really enjoying my first couple of plays with Dead of Winter, and just wish that I could get it to the table more often. So on the occasion of Halloween last week, I thought I’d dedicate my Picture of the Week to an image from my play of it last week:

I thought that the color vs. B&W effect on this image was pretty appropriate. With the color scheme of Dead of Winter, there really wasn’t all that much color to cancel out anyway. And I was also wondering if people out there would be interested in learning how to do such a thing to create images like this with an isolated element against a black and white background. If so, just let me know in the comments and I’ll think about putting something together.

]]>http://gamerchris.net/2014/11/picture-of-the-week-dead-of-winter/feed/1Bang Five Comicshttp://gamerchris.net/2014/10/bang-five-comics/
Tue, 28 Oct 2014 15:37:38 +0000http://gamerchris.net/?p=1123[…]]]>Okay… I am going to keep up and not get months behind again. I promise… I hope, anyway.

So this past week at game night, I had plans. Big plans! Since I had missed the previous week and have some other things coming up soon that might keep me away again, my wife Gwen took pity on me and let me bypass the family dinner to get there extra early. So even with working a little late, I was inside ye olde FLGS at 5:30, two big bags full o’ games in tow, looking for some hot, gaming action.

It didn’t take long then for me to jump right into it. Five Tribes had already seen some measure of play in the group, but I wasn’t ever able to partake before now. But since I now have my own copy (as crumpled as it was by the gorilla that apparently works in the USPS sorting facility), it was high time that I got it to the table as well.

Chris had played at least once before, so he helped make sure that I knew what I was doing from my perusal of the rules. Ray also joined us, though his understanding was a little incomplete before the 3rd or 4th turn of the game.

I had heard how important collecting the merchandise cards could be (as in, every winner in our group so far has focused on them so far), so I tried to make a point to grab some green meeples early on and start building my set. I also picked up a couple of Djinns early, one of which was totally useless (the one that adds more meeples to the board), and one which got me some good points (being able to pay an elder or slave to place another Palace). I don’t know that I had a really solid “strategy” going on, really, but I felt like I played pretty competently.

Somehow, and despite my efforts to focus on the cards a lot, Chris managed to finagle his way into a complete set of all 9 types by endgame. And on top of that, he definitely taught me some about using Assassins to kill off meeples and claiming tiles that way. So while it was at least close, he still edged me out in the end to take the victory.

My expectations for Five Tribes were pretty high. Between all the hype coming out of GenCon and now Essen, and then the good buzz it’s already had in my group, I was a little afraid that it would actually let me down when I finally played it myself. Well… it didn’t. In fact, it pretty much met or exceeded what I had hoped it would be!

It’s definitely more complicated than many other Days of Wonder games (as the box sort of warns people of), but once you get past the learning curve of the different actions that you can use (both from the meeples and the location powers), it’s not all that difficult to understand or play. So for the more experienced family gamers or as a lighter game for hardcore gamers, it seems to be just perfect. I don’t tend to make many predictions like this, but if it’s not nominated (and probably win) the Kennerspiel des Jahres next year, then I really don’t understand what that award is aiming at.

If there is a downside, the potential for analysis paralysis would probably be it, though. It didn’t bother us at game night, but when I played with my wife over the weekend (twice, even!), she got a little locked up in trying to make the “right” or “best” move. Still, though, I don’t like to blame games for what are essentially player “problems”, and with the way I play it, I don’t feel it’s overly AP-inducing to me, anyway.

So, I’m thrilled to now own Five Tribes, and figure that it’s going to continue to be a hit both at home and with my gamer friends for a long time!

By then, some others had joined game night, and having exactly 7 people, it seemed to be a good idea to start a quick game of Bang! The Dice Game to do something all together for a change. Of course, just as we were about to deal out the role cards, Keith walked in, but Kenny just peeled off to play some Space Hulk with him instead, leaving us with probably the “ideal” 6 players we needed for the game.

The game went quick, though. Even though Chris, the Sheriff, didn’t know it at first, his fate was pretty much sealed by the fact that we was surrounded by all three Outlaws (with James on the right side and me and Chip on the other). We took it easy on him for the first round, but then got more and more aggressive as we started to take some damage as well. And on top of that, the Indians apparently had it out for him, taking a chunk or two out of him through the game as well. Heck, it seems like he even got hurt from playing with dynamite at one point!

So, I’ve not been a huge fan of the DC Deck-Building game, but I also haven’t found it so offensive that I refuse to play or anything like that. So when, as we were all shuffling ourselves up and trying to figure out what to play, Darren mentioned that he had the new Crisis Expansion for it and wanted to get it played, I was happy to join in.

Even as casual a comic book fan as I am, Crisis on Infinite Earths and the ensuing reboot of the whole DC universe afterwards hit right when I was probably the most into comics I’ve ever been. And while I like the Marvel universe as well, I’m probably a bigger DC fan because of how much better and more mature the storylines were in DC back then in the late 80’s/early 90’s.

All that being said, I had some pretty high hopes that the Crisis expansion would give me some of the payoff that the story itself gave me. And especially considering that it turns the game into a full coop game (which I generally like a lot anyway), I was looking for good things. And for the first 45 minutes or so, I’d say that I was definitely enjoying the cooperative deck-building thing that the game was delivering.

But then, the game kept going for another 95 minutes. By the end, it was way less good. And despite starting with this huge stack of cards in the main deck, we lost because we had gone through the whole freaking thing and still not won. In fact, we still had 2 or 3 more supervillains and Crisis cards to go before reaching the Anti-Monitor and having even a shot at winning.

I went equipment heavy, and the power rings went well with my copy of Kyle Rayner…

Yeah, I gave it a “3”. That means “Bad” on my rating scale. “Something is broken and/or actively un-fun in the game… I don’t like that at all.” So what made it so terribly bad, prompting me to Tweet “Truly torturous” just after playing?

First of all, there were some changes to the basic gameplay that I found a little strange. Rather than always refilling the central array of cards back up to 5 each turn, but instead, you just always add one new card (since the deck is a timer for the game). This wasn’t really bad, just different.

A little more strange is the fact that when you defeat villains, you no longer put them into your deck. Some people had always found it stupid that villains would come to work for you once you beat them, but clearly, it never meant that the villain itself was coming back to lend you its power. Thematically, it was always that the experience you gained from the encounter gave you an advantage in the future. And that’s why not adding them to your deck in the version just doesn’t make sense to me.

Of course, one problematic issue from villains potentially being in your deck, but which also comes up from other cards you might purchase, is the Attack powers that some of them have. Since the base game is semi-cooperative, it makes sense to have cards that attack the other players. But when you go fully coop, all the sudden that card that was a benefit in holding back an opponent becomes a detriment to all of you accomplishing your goal. It just makes the whole cooperative premise to Crisis feel shoehorned in and less cohesive.
But the truly horrible part of the game, what made it drag on freaking forever, was the Crisis cards. In the base game, you have a stack of Supervillains that you have to work your way through. In the expansion, each of those Supervillains is paired with a Crisis card. Before you can accomplish the condition of the Crisis card, all regular villains must be defeated in the array of available cards, and then the Crisis card must be accomplished before you can take out the Supervillain. In theory, this isn’t all that bad, but what really pissed me off was how random and irrelevant most of the Crisis cards seemed to be.

For instance, one Crisis card had every player reveal the top card of their decks, and if any of those cards had a cost of exactly 2, it would be defeated. But of course, this first requires the decks to have cards in them that cost 2. And then, it has to be on the top of the deck rather than further down or (as we had a few times) drawn into your hand. The only way we finally beat it was when I realized that my special hero power (for the Crisis version of Martian Manhunter) lets a player put a hero back on top of their deck on a turn when I play 2 or more heroes. It still took us a few rounds before I both had 2 heroes to play in my hand and another person had a hero of cost 2 in their discard piles, but eventually we managed to get past it.

Another card I can remember is that every player had to discard cards of a total cost of 8 from their hands. And it seemed like forever before we all had 1) enough high-value cards in our hand to actually discard 8 cost cards, and 2) were willing to get rid of them without crippling our deck in the process.

Again, I know that cooperative games should be difficult, and that they often involve a significant amount of luck in the way the challenge plays out. But at least half of the time, the Crisis cards felt so random that we as players just didn’t have any real choice or agency to make a difference. And especially as we got into the late game, there were several turns when we weren’t able to pass the Crisis card, so we couldn’t fight the Supervillain (even though we had a ton of power in our hands), and there wasn’t anything in the array of cards we wanted to buy, so we basically just discarded our hands and passed the turn.

Therefore, the equation of the game looks sort of like this: (Random gameplay + limited player agency + meaningless turns)/140 minutes = sucky, annoying game that ruined most of my game night.

]]>Cleaning the Place Up a Littlehttp://gamerchris.net/2014/10/cleaning-the-place-up-a-little/
Mon, 27 Oct 2014 17:21:34 +0000http://gamerchris.net/?p=1158[…]]]>Again, I know that I’ve been neglecting the place lately, but over the last week, I’ve been trying to correct that a little. Since I posted my last article, I’ve also built a new page for my Review Index, which has basically been broken since I did the site transfer. It’s now updated and hopefully all the links work properly.

Another thing that has been broken since the transfer is that while the Categories transitioned over from the old site, the Tags for each article did not. Categories are how I group articles into big buckets, like Solo Gaming, Reviews, my Gaming Weblog, or the Podcast episodes. And then in general, I’ve always used Tags to mark the particular games mentioned significantly in an article.

So basically, I’ve started trying to go backwards through my articles and add Tags to older posts as I have time. I’ve only made it back through about 5 or 6 pages of the 39 pages I have in my editing application, but it will be a project I will try to continue with over the coming weeks.

Otherwise, if you see something that needs some attention, please let me know, and I’ll add it to the list of things to do.

]]>Catching Up Through Pictureshttp://gamerchris.net/2014/10/catching-up-through-pictures/
Tue, 21 Oct 2014 21:03:03 +0000http://gamerchris.net/?p=1076[…]]]>It’s been a long time since I’ve written much of anything. This wasn’t necessarily some intention of mine, but one thing just led to another, and it seems like the next time I looked at the blog, it had been a freaking month since I’d even touched it. Thankfully, I haven’t stopped playing games (for the most part, anyway), it’s just been the time for writing and ‘casting about them that has disappeared lately. So, in an attempt to dig myself out of a self-imposed hole of being waaaaay behind in my game night reports, I’m going to do something a little less involved than usual…

I’ve been playing quite a bit of Marvel Legendary lately. I had sort of decided at one point that I just didn’t want to like the game, so I therefore hadn’t ever picked it up or made a serious attempt to play it, but then for an equally random and capricious reason, I grabbed it from Barnes & Noble with a coupon and gift card. And what I found is that, especially for a deckbuilder, I like it quite a lot. Between the cool synergy mechanics of the different card types and group affiliations and then the really good thematic components of the Mastermind and his Scheme (which make a huge difference in how the game plays each time), I think it hits a homerun in a lot of ways. And while playing it with 5 people is just too dern much, I’ve enjoyed it both solo and with smaller groups as well.

Android: Netrunner has continued to be my biggest obsession over the last several months. The main way I’ve been playing lately is using core-set-only decks with a few others around the game group who are also newer to the game, but I’ve also gotten in some plays with a few “regular” decks, especially my Nasir Meidan runner deck and Jinteki Personal Evolution corp deck. Even though it’s been harder to find games lately at the store, I’m still very invested in the game, and there’s really nothing else in my gaming life that is more interesting to me these days.

I was finally able to try out Lewis & Clark for the first time sometime back in September. Now, after hearing a lot about it (mostly good, but some a little more neutral), I was expecting pretty good things from it. It was just a 2-player game, so I don’t know if I got the full experience necessarily, but I had a really great time with it. The card-drafting was similar in a lot of ways to Condordia (where you build up your hand of cards, play them for actions, and then have to choose when to take a “reset” turn to get them all back), but there was actually a little more of an engine-building feel as you had to plan out how you were going to use your cards together to tackle both the water and mountain movement that you need. I haven’t run out and bought it yet, but it definitely went right onto my wishlist, and I’d certainly like to try it again sometime soon.

Even though the Kickstarter ended, I’ve continued to play some of the Pack O Game titles here and there. HUE is definitely my favorite, but GEM is really good and FLY is even pretty interesting for a really simple dexterity game as well. I’m glad that I became a backer and can’t wait to see some of the other games that I didn’t have the chance to try out yet.

I’ve wanted to play Sushi Go! for a very long time, but it wasn’t until the new Gamewright version finally came out that I got the chance. And since it hit the shelves of our FLGS, it’s been a go-to filler for our group. In fact, the store has had trouble keeping it on the shelf because it seems like everyone I know has picked up a copy. I mean, how can you argue with such adorable little sushi, especially when the gameplay itself is also pretty compelling.

Similarly, I’ve heard about Risk Express for years now, so when I saw its reimplementation (Age of War) on the shelf at Cool Stuff Inc. (during my trip to Orlando with the family), I immediately grabbed it up. So far, I’ve only played it once, though, and was moderately satisfied with it. For the light, dice-rolling conquest game that it is, it does a pretty good job. The main thing that seemed to be obviously missing, however, is the chance to gain some sort of special abilities to help you on future rolls. In fact, it was a little hard to believe that you really didn’t get any effect from conquering regions other than the points they would net you at the end of the game. But of course, if the game does well, I wouldn’t be surprised at all to see something like this in an expansion sometime down the road.

The other game that I picked up from CSI was Rise of Augustus. Even with its SdJ nomination and all sorts of rave reviews, I was still a little skeptical that “gamer bingo” could really be all that good. Well, after a handful of games so far, I must attest that it is, in fact, thatgood. Yes, it’s simple and has a lot of luck, but it’s also fun, has a lot of interesting and meaningful decisions, and plays quickly for all of its supported player counts (which is up to 6, by the way). I really need to try this with my wife and some other casual gamers, because I can see Augustus being something that will get a lot of play with almost everyone I game with.

On the other hand, Splendor is something that has not gone over well at all in my group. In fact, it already had a pretty bad reputation before I got it, but I really wanted to try it out for myself, so I pulled the trigger anyway and bullied people into playing it with me. And while there’s certainly not anything terribly wrong with it, I also don’t see what all the crazy excitement over it is all about. Yes, there are some choices to make both strategically and tactically about how you’ll approach it, but those choices are very shallow and obvious. And then, the actual turn-by-turn play is painfully boring as everyone just sort of sits there and stares at the cards, trying to calculate which ones would be best for them to take, only to have the perfect card taken by your right-hand neighbor, making you have to start over in your mundane calculations now taking into account the new card that flopped over in its place. Again, I’m not saying that it’s terrible, and I definitely want to try this with my wife as well (mostly to see if it’s better with 2 players), but other than the nice art and incredible chips, I just don’t get all the love people have for it.

I had played different prototypes of Belle of the Ball a couple of times during its playtesting period, but was happy when it recently made its way out to Kickstarter backers. The artwork is gorgeous, the humor of the names is cute and whimsical, and the underlying game is, while light and quick, still pretty interesting.

Glass Road made an appearance recently, and I had some fun with it (winning the game, actually). It’s solid and interesting, but I also can’t help but think that the level of thinking/planning/over-analyzing in the game is a bit out of balance with the relatively light weight of the game. I’ve enjoyed my plays so far, but it’s just not the sort of game that, for me anyway, stands up and demands to be played over and over again.

Another game I’ve heard a lot about lately is Thunder Alley, so when the chance to play arose, I made sure to jump on it. The game is definitely thematic, and I really enjoyed the experience of playing out a NASCAR race. But as a game, it was pretty weak in a lot of ways as well. There’s a ton of randomness in the cards you’re dealt, and even more chaos as other players’ cardplay can drastically affect your cars. There are some choices to make, for sure, but a lot of them are pretty obvious (like trying to stay with a group rather than going on your own). I thought that the teamwork aspect, both with how you used your cars to help each other out and how you develop shifting alliances with other players, was really cool as well. But in the end, it’s mostly just an “experience game” for me that delivers on the theme but doesn’t offer a lot as a game.

I also got in a play of Eminent Domain that week. My intention for bringing it was to finally get the Escalation expansion to the table, but since a few others in the game weren’t very familiar with the base game, we kept it simple this time around. I went as hard as I could to set up a produce/trade cycle, and managed to eek out a win over some other players doing a lot more aggressive exploration approach.

And finally, in honor of Halloween this month, the last game I played was King of Tokyo with the Halloween expansion. Somehow or other, I managed to pull out a victory-point win as Pumpkin Jack. Trick or treat, indeed!

Whew! Now that this is all done and I’m basically caught up, hopefully I’ll be able to keep up. So stay tuned as I try to get back into the habit of doing what I love best: playing and talking about games!

]]>Picture of the Week – Lewis & Clarkhttp://gamerchris.net/2014/09/picture-of-the-week-lewis-clark/
Fri, 05 Sep 2014 20:12:27 +0000http://gamerchris.net/?p=1069[…]]]>I’ve heard a lot about Lewis & Clark since it was released, but didn’t ever get to actually play until just this week at game night, when Stacy and I played a 2-player game. I was pretty pleasantly surprised by how it played, and I even got this nice little photo of it as we neared the endgame…

]]>Pack O Game Kickstarter is about to Pack it In!http://gamerchris.net/2014/08/pack-o-game-kickstarter-is-about-to-pack-it-in/
http://gamerchris.net/2014/08/pack-o-game-kickstarter-is-about-to-pack-it-in/#commentsFri, 29 Aug 2014 18:10:57 +0000http://gamerchris.net/?p=1054[…]]]>It’s not every day that I get excited about a Kickstarter campaign. And probably even less common is when I get excited about some new microgame that’s coming out. But starting from when I first heard about, and especially now that I’ve been able to see and experience, the new Pack O Game line coming out from Chris Handy and Perplext (his publishing company), I got excited.

The whole premise (and the name, of course) for these games is that they are literally just about the same size as a pack of gum. In this itsy-bitsy package, all the games include exactly 30 small cards (1 inch x 3 inches) and a little fold-out rulesheet. They’re cute and attractive, and many of us would probably pick up a few of them just for the novelty of having games that are truly as “micro” as they are.

But there’s some really cool stuff going on in these teensey-weensey packages. First of all, Chris has done a really amazing job of figuring out several different ways to use just 30 tiny cards. In just the four games that I’ve seen in person, you have a card/tile placement game, an auction game, a fighting game, and a dexterity game. So despite the very limited component constraints of the line, there’s a pretty huge variety in the gameplay available. More than that, from what I’ve seen and heard so far, there’s also a pretty huge quality of play in these small games as well.

I actually got some of the games in my hands after the Kickstarter campaign had already started, so I haven’t had as much time to play them as I would have liked. But as a long-time hardcore gamer, I was very impressed with both HUE and GEM in how much depth they both had.

In HUE, you have a hand of cards that are divided into 3 different colors. This division is done either vertically (into three big 1″x1″ squares) or horizontally (into three small strips running the length of the card). These cards are placed onto the table either beside other cards or even overlapping 1/3 of another card in order to make continuous areas of the different colors. The game ends when everyone has placed all but one of their cards, and their score is based on the largest area of the three colors on that last card in their hand. And in addition, everyone has one card with a “poison” symbol on it, which will cancel out an area of that color if you manage to play it into that area.

For a 5-10 minute game, I found it to have a ton of room for cool play and interesting choices. Just the fact that you get to choose which card to use for your scoring, and can even change which card it will be right up to when you have your last placement, it really neat. And, of course, you then have all the tactical choice of where to place your cards, sort of work together with others to build large areas of common interest, and maybe even bluff your opponents into thinking that you care about a color you really aren’t interesed in at all.

GEM is actually a very constrained and unique auction game. Everyone starts out with the same resources (coins of value 1, 2, and 3), which you use to bid on cards picturing 1 or 2 different gems. In addition to winning the auctions, you also have to use your money to “activate” the gems before you can use them to bid on items in later rounds and before they will count towards your score at the end of the game.

And again, for its size and length (more like 20 minutes in this case), GEM is pretty amazing for its efficiency and its creativity.

The big problem with these and all the other games is that the Kickstarter for all the Pack O Game games ends in just over a day. So if anything you’ve read here sounds interesting, I strongly encourage to go over to the Kickstarter page and consider backing them. It’s well exceeded its goal so far, so a $24 pledge for all four core games (HUE, GEM, TKO, and FLY) will now get you all the stretch goal games (TAJ, BUS, SHH, and LIE) as well.

To me, it was a no-brainer, so I’ve already pledged and can’t wait to have the rest of these cool little games in my hands.

]]>http://gamerchris.net/2014/08/pack-o-game-kickstarter-is-about-to-pack-it-in/feed/1Legendary hi-Fidelity Russian Android Bugs infest Camels in Istanbul to find Santiago Blueprintshttp://gamerchris.net/2014/08/legendary-hi-fidelity-russian-android-bugs-infest-camels-in-istanbul-to-find-santiago-blueprints/
Tue, 26 Aug 2014 15:38:41 +0000http://gamerchris.net/?p=1035[…]]]>This has become quite a big report after I’ve stored up 3 weeks of game night without writing one. And what’s cool is that I played 5 “new” (to me, anyway) games over this time, at least a couple of which really surprised me (in a positive way, even!). So, without further ado, here we go!

We’re starting some work in my game group to support building up our Netrunner community a little more. All four of these games were against John or Keith, both of whom are basically just getting into it.

To start with, John played some of my “complex” decks against me. In the first game, I tried out the new NBN identity (Near Earth Hub) from the Upstalk data pack, and managed to fast-advance my way to victory. I then took the same Noise deck that he played and promptly lost embarrassingly to my HB Engineering the Future deck. I really want to make Noise work (because his whole ability to play viruses and make the corp discard cards from R&D is so freaking cool), but I just haven’t figured it out at all quite yet. Heck, maybe it’s not even possible right now, but I’m gonna remain positive that it may eventually come into its own, especially with some of the other virus cards that’ll be in upcoming packs.

Our third game together (a week or two later, though) had John once again taking my HB Deck as I played the new Shaper identity, Nasir Meidan. Nasir has this really cool ability that any time he encounters a piece of ICE that was just rezzed, he loses all the money in his credit pool and gains credits equal to the rez cost of the ICE. So both to work around and to take advantage of this ability, I’ve built a deck that’s all about having things to do with the money just prior to losing it (with Personal Workshop, Self-modifying Code, Clone Chips, and other stuff) and to get some recurring credits (from The Toolbox and Cyberfeeder) to power my icebreakers. It was a really cool (and long) game, where I eventually got out my whole breaker suite (Battering Ram, Gordian Blade, and Garrotte), but he had mounds of mostly-rezzed big ICE protecting his servers. On the last turn, though, he made the same mistake I made in Regionals when he installed the game-point agenda in a server that was really nasty (in trashing programs and doing brain damage), but that didn’t actually end the run very effectively. So after clicking thru the Eli at the top of the server, I limped my way through the rest of the ICE, losing my whole rig and 2 cards from hand in the process, but still took the win by stealing the agenda.

The last game I played this week was against Keith, who had played once a long, long time ago, but has picked up a Core set recently and is interested in really getting into the game. We’re thinking of getting a league started soon, and to encourage newer players, we’re probably going to start off with having the decks be core-only for the first 2-4 weeks. So in the vein, I recently got a 3rd core set for the express purpose of building core-only/introductory decks to use in teaching the game. Our friend Kenny has also started doing the same, so Keith actually took his NBN deck as I played my Criminal one. It was basically a learning game, so it took a little longer than it should, but I think Keith was starting to get his head around it by the time we were done.

Just in case any of you happen to be in the local area (central NC/Burlington-Graham), we’d be happy to get you plugged into the developing league as well. Our FLGS has supposedly ordered a prize-support kit, so we’re hoping to make it a real thing pretty soon.

Moving on then, the next game I got in was my first play of Russian Railroads at an actual game night. I had played with my wife a few times and once with her and my brother, but it was really cool to finally get it to the table with my game-night buddies. Partly because I wanted to try out something a little different from my “usual” strategy (which is to push on the Trans Siberian railroad with assistance from the Moscow-St. Petersburg line), I decided to instead try and max out my use of the Industry track with help from both of the shorter ones.

For a lot of the game, it seemed to be working really well. I managed to get my initial industry tracker to move up pretty quickly, and in the process pulled off some cool shenanigans where I triggered the ruble space 3 times in one turn to have a huge bank of 8 or so of them (while everyone else was completely poor, even). And then in activating the bonus token spaces on the Moskow-St. Petersburg line, I started the second token and sort of started all over in the last few turns of the game. Unfortunately, the real limitation on industry is that it’s still basically capped on how many points it can earn, so I was really struggling in the last turn or two to maximize my points.

Meanwhile, Keith was approaching the game with a whole different mindset than I had used before. While I had been jumping on the biggest, quickest spaces most of the time (like the 3-track for 2 workers spaces for black and silver), he focused more on being efficient with his workers and getting the better bang for his buck in using the 2-for-1 spaces, as well as focusing on getting his Trans Siberian railroad going. He also pounded on getting Engineers as much as he could, winning the big bonus despite my huge stack of money, as well as picking up some points from other avenues (like activating the factories that scored for engineers and locomotives). So in the end, and despite my early-game dominant position, Keith made the big come-from-behind move and took the win.

I have to say that this play of Russian Railroads did a lot for my opinion of it. It still doesn’t have quite the breadth of strategy that I would like to see in it, but at the same time, I also feel like some measure of group-think (if just my wife and me can be considered a “group”) limited what I was able to see in the game previously. Even if you’re always going to be using some mixture of the same 2 or 3 things in the game, there’s definitely more subtlety and tactical choice there than I was thinking previously. So, therefore, I still want to see more from it, and will hopefully have more chance to play it soon.

Now, for some reason that I can’t always articulate, I occasionally find myself having an aversion to a particular game from time to time. And whether it was because I’m more of a DC fan, because I’m more than a little burned-out on deckbuilding games, or whatever else was going on with me, dudgummit, I just didn’t want to like the Marvel Legendary game. I had pretty much purposefully avoided it in the past, and despite all the good press and several expansions and sequels that have and are coming out for it, I still just didn’t want to bother with it.

But then, for an equally random and unspecified reason, I had a whim to pick it up using a coupon and gift certificate that I got for Barnes & Noble back from my birthday. And over the last month or so, both as a solo game and with others, I’ve really surprised myself by coming to really enjoy the game.

It’s been long enough that I don’t remember a lot of detail about any one game, but I can certainly remember the experience that I’ve pretty consistently found that it gives me…

Two things really stand out to me about Legendary. First is the way that the Scheme in each play really changes up the game in a very real and thematic way. Between the wrinkles introduced with each Scheme Twist, the victory and loss conditions for each Scheme, and the way that the Scheme intersects with each Mastermind’s abilities, I feel very much like I’m experiencing a “realistic” superhero story each time I play.

Mechanically, I also love the way that the different hero cards key off of each other. Whether it’s based on the team affiliation or the skill icons, every play is a really cool little puzzle of trying to figure out which things you’ll focus on and how you can get them to work together to make the best deck you can. And since the icons usually vary within a hero’s cards but also cross over between different heroes, there’s usually a lot of options with each setup that you can pursue.

I’m not going to fully review it quite yet, but I have gone ahead and picked up most (all, maybe?) of the expansions, and I really can’t wait to continue exploring all that Legendary has in store for me with this added wealth of heroes, masterminds, and schemes.

On the next game night, I spent more time with Stacy and others exploring the more “euro” side of the hobby. Since it can hold up to 8 players, we started off with a play of SdJ-winner Camel Up.

There’s not much to really say about any one play of Camel Up, though. We rolled the dice, made some wagers, and crazy camel stacking ensued. In the end, my extremely improbable bet for the winner turned out to come true, but it still wasn’t enough to overtake Ray.

Camel Up is really cute. For what it is (an almost-totally-random little dice-based race game), it’s fun. But really, there’s not much meaningful choice here at all. Your options tend to be either totally unpredictable or painfully obvious. But still, it’s colorful and silly and doesn’t wear out it’s welcome, so I can see why it would be a good winner.

Stepping up from the SdJ to the slightly more meaty KdJ winner, I then tried out Istanbul for the first time. Both Stacy and Keith had played a couple of times, so we went straight to the “long path” setup for the tiles, which I was totally cool with.

The basic idea of Istanbul is that you move your merchant around to these different areas of the city to collect different goods, sell or other wise use those goods to do different things, and eventually to buy or win 5 rubies to win the game. At each location, though, you have to either drop off one of your little helper discs or pick one back up, so the real skill of the game is in deciding how to plan out your moves to run some little kind of “engine” to win the game without being too inefficient in having to waste moves in picking up your helpers.

Again, without any real detail, Stacy did a much better job of it than I did. Keith and I scored the same, but he was actually just a turn or two from picking up another ruby or two, so the numbers don’t really tell the whole story here.

For what it is, I really liked Istanbul a lot. It’s extremely efficient and quick, and I’d say that it’s approachable enough for almost anyone to play. It may be just a little step above Ticket to Ride in complexity (since it’s not quite as obvious what you should be doing in the game), but it’s actually a little shorter than TtR, which is really nice. So while it’s not necessarily something that I would see me and my gamer friends pulling out all the time, I do plan on picking it up sometime so that it will be available to my family as my girls get a little older.

Then, I pulled out a truly classic, euro-style auction game that I recently picked up. I have heard lots and lots about Santiago for years, and wanted to see if it was as good, and as cutthroat, as I’ve been told. And in our first game, I’d say that I got at least part of that experience, anyway.

We definitely engaged well with the auction part of the game. But since it was everyone’s first play, I think we sort of played a little bit too nice in how we placed our tiles on the board to create the different fields. While we tried to get a little “dirty” in making bribes later on in the game, we had set things up so well by then that almost anywhere could be watered with very little trouble, so it sort of lacked a little of the tension that I know the game is known for.

I was basically in control of this huge potato farm for most of the game. So once I had a big investment in it and knew I was scoring a lot of points, I started to try and get my fingers into a number of the other larger fields as well. But as the game moved towards its end, Keith once again managed to pull from behind, this time by going practically “all in” on a huge sugarcane farm, to score a bunch of points and steal away my victory.Time: 65 minutesScore: Keith* 120, Norton* 107, Stacy* 104, Kenny* 100Ratings: Keith 7, Norton 7, Stacy 7, Kenny 7.5

We all walked away from Santiago feeling really good about it. The auction was nice and set up some really cool little decisions about which tiles to choose and where to place them, and we definitely feel like there’s a lot more room to explore in how we could place our tiles to mess with each other and then bribe the canal overseer to screw over people even more. If there’s any little concern that we might have about it, it would be that in the last turn especially, the values of all the fields are open and calculable, which could potentially result in some analysis paralysis and/or spreadsheeting of the final turn that might kind of ruin an otherwise fun game. But I guess that’s only a problem if you let it be, and I don’t know that my group would care that much for that kind of approach.

And then to finish off this marathon of a report, the last thing we played a couple of weeks ago was Blueprints. Now, I was willing to play and all, but definitely most of what I had heard about this game was a lot more on the negative side. So as the game was being taught and we got into it, I had pretty low expectations for it. But perhaps because of the fact that I didn’t expect much, I actually ended up being pretty happy with the experience of the game.

Basically, at the beginning of each round, every player is given a little “blueprint” card picturing a structure that they’re going to try and build by drafting 6 dice from the middle of the table. There are a few different colors of dice that all score differently (based on their position in the structure, how many of the color you have, or the value of their pips), and you also score for completing the structure as pictured on your card.

Since I was apparently destined to be bridesmaid over the last few weeks, I once again came in second as Kenny edged me out this time.Time: 38 minutesScore: Kenny* 12, Norton* 10, Keith* 2, Stacy* 2Ratings: Kenny 7, Norton 6, Keith 7, Stacy 7

Again, for what it is and is trying to do, I though Blueprints was a pretty good game. I’m a little worried that some colors of dice are inherently more valuable/powerful than others, but especially if this is something you plan to use with your family or casual gamer friends, I think you could do a lot worse. But like a lot of others have said before, prepare to pick up a larger bag to draw the dice from, because the one included in the game is barely big enough to squeeze them all in to start with.